> I think there are good reasons to believe this is not generally how the writers of Star Trek thought the transporters in their stories were supposed to work, but they weren't always perfectly consistent on the subject.

I remember one episode of one of the TV shows (I forget which one), they used a transporter to transport a bomb off the ship, so it detonated in space instead. If transportation is converting matter to information, transmitting the information, then reassembling it at the other end, why would one bother doing that to a bomb? Just do the first step of converting matter to information, and then instead of transmitting it and reassembling it somewhere else, just send the information to /dev/null

(I think if someone was designing a bomb, in a situation in which such technology was known, they'd try to design it so that any attempt to dematerialise/transport it would detonate it instantly.)